


Plenty of Fish in the Sea

by Multifandom_damnation



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Bisexual Mollymauk Tealeaf, Bottom Fjord (Critical Role), F/M, First Kiss, First Love, First Meetings, First Time, Fjord (Critical Role)-centric, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Mild Sexual Content, Original Female Character(s) - Freeform, Sexuality Crisis, Time Skips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-19
Updated: 2019-06-19
Packaged: 2020-05-14 17:31:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,389
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19278058
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Multifandom_damnation/pseuds/Multifandom_damnation
Summary: Fjord remembers all the women he has ever loved and the very few who have ever loved him back and realizes that maybe the reason he has never been in a real relationship is that he's been too busy hating himself to notice the people who really loved him. He wasn't lying when he told the Mighty Nein that he wasn't a sexual person. And as Vandren always said- there's plenty of fish in the sea.(AKA all the times Fjord found himself at the mercy of a woman he fancied and all the times it had backfired. And the times it should have, but didn't)





	Plenty of Fish in the Sea

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah, I know this is weird and the format is weird and EVERYTHING IS WEIRD but it's not as bad as the tags and summaries make it sound, it's just every person Fjord had a crush on before the Nein and every crush after, so I hope you like it. I need to step up my CR game. it doesn't seem like my recent ones are liked as much haha. 
> 
> Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this, I wrote it in less than 12 hours because I thought of the title and got the rare SPARK that I loved and I'm actually pleased with how this turned out, even if it is a little bit confusing. Thanks for reading x

When Fjord had told the Mighty Nein that he wasn’t the most sexual person, he wasn’t sugar-coating anything.

As a child, he had a crush on a little human girl with curly brown hair and bright, inquisitive eyes, a skip in her step and a high, giggling voice. He thought his heart was going to fall through his toes every time she looked at him. She took the breath from his lungs every time she smiled at him. He didn’t even know her name, too in love and to naïve to even ask, but the very first time he had ever considered going up and talking to her, the bigger kids would push him down and beat him up and she would laugh along with their taunting. When Fjord first started cutting away at his tusks, he often thought of curly hair and a wonderful smile, until he never thought of her again.

When he was a teenager, there was a woman who would come through the town and play her music in the square and she would laugh and cheer and wink at Fjord when he tossed a coin into her case already filling with money, and when the performance had ended and his pockets were lighter than he would have wanted them to be, she pulled him into an alley and pressed him against the wall and breathed into his ear, “Nice try, young one,” her voice was honey, and Fjord had never been so close to a girl before. “But you’ll have to do better than tossing some gold at me.” And then she was gone and Fjord was left alone, holding his chest.

Once he was in a bar, drinking deep into his cups when a halfling leapt onto the table and began to dance with Fjord, standing on the bar so she was head-height with him, and he was having such a good time that he didn’t think about anything else for the duration. He didn’t even think about any ulterior motives until he was back in his room after a lovely night to find his coin purse gone and his joyous mood along with it.

He was standing on the docks with his hands full of rigging when Vandren pointed out the half-elf with the curvy hips and long eyelashes and Fjord watched her open-mouthed as she passed him with barely a look in his direction. She flicked her long blonde hair over her shoulder and latched herself onto the arm of a human, who looked smugly at Fjord, noticing his glance. Vandren had just laughed, patting Fjord on the shoulder and said, “Don’t worry Fjord. There's plenty of fish in the sea.”

One of the shipmates had dragged Fjord to a House of Lady Favours the night before one of their longest trips, and he had stood awkwardly in a corner the whole time while his mates were whisked away and he was trying to hide in the shadows to keep from being noticed.

Her name was Zandra, and she had the softest lips Fjord had ever felt.

Blue hair was all Fjord could really remember of that drunken night, bright blue hair and maybe-pointed ears and a silken dress that showed off more than he could ever have imagined, and she sat on his lap as she kissed him with his hands on her waist and her fingers caressing his cheeks and she made some gratifying comment at how much better it was to kiss him without his tusks in the way.

The thought of sex hadn’t crossed Fjord's mind before, so being ushered into a woman’s bedroom after having all the air kissed out of him and shoved onto the bed was not at all what he expected for a regular night. He was keen until she started taking off her clothes and then Fjord realized that he was being a fool and looked away from her. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m not so sure that this is such a good idea.” Obviously disappointed, she took her clothes and left Fjord alone in the bedroom.

“Excuse me,” he asked the pretty gnome with the frizzy hair and button nose who was selling flowers from a cart. “D-do you know which way to Trostenwald?” she laughed at him before pointing him in the right direction and he cursed himself the whole way there.

And then everything changed.

Jester was nothing that he expected and not at all what he anticipated, bubbly and loud and bright and borderline obnoxious, but she was sweet and kind and Fjord hadn’t had a friend for a long time, not since before the explosion and the drowning and the giant eye and the waking up on a shore, so despite Jester being everything he usually tried to avoid, he stayed by her side.

“You’re very handsome, Fjord,” she would complement him like it was the easiest thing in the world while Ford felt like he was drowning all over again. “I think you’re super powerful.”

She said it with such genuine care that Fjord didn’t really know how to respond. He hadn’t been treated with such kindness by a woman in his whole life, but this little blue tiefling with the green cloak and sketchbook and little pink dress was suddenly making Fjord realize that maybe not all women were going to laugh in his face.

Beau was gruff and bitter and sometimes spoke like she had more respect for a pebble under her shoe than she had for people. Nott was a little goblin who stole and drank and lied and Fjord didn’t really know what to make of her. Yasha was stern and large and all-encompassing, and when Fjord tried to barter with her and show her that he was more than green skin and tusks, she knocked him back down a few pegs. All very different, but none of them were like Jester.

It was Molly who taught him that beauty didn’t just come from women and that tattoos and scars and wicked words were just as attractive as curvy hips and long flowing hair and gentle hands. He wore jewellery on every finger and every available space between his ears to his horns, and his coat was so ostentatious that sometimes Fjord was forced to look away from the too-bright colours.

He was almost always naked and he was not afraid to be, and the more skin he showed off the better. He didn’t care what people thought of him. He didn’t mind how people looked at him. He wore a smile on his face at all times that could act as both a shield and a dagger.

“How do you do it?” Fjord had asked one day while he watched Molly twist in the mirror, stark naked, to get a good look at a wound on his back.

“Do what?”

“Act as if nothing bothers you. Like you don’t care what people think of you.”

Molly got dressed before he replied. “Because I don’t give a fuck. If I did, then the world would be a much darker place. If I cared about what every person I’ve ever laid thought of me, I’d both be pleasantly surprised and absolutely offended, but I don’t care. People out there don’t know me. They think they do, but they don’t. Fuck them. They either like me or they don’t. I’m going to be who I am whether they like it or not.”

“Does that ever affect your… relationships?”

Shrugging, Molly had picked up his swords and placed it back at his side and rested his hands on them. “I’m not really a relationship kind of man, at least at the moment, so I’m not quite sure I could help you in the relationship department. But if someone finds me attractive or funny or think I’ll be a good fuck, then we find the time. But if they think I look like a piece of shit or only want to fuck to satisfy some sort of kinky urge, then I turn them away. Men, women, people in between- I don’t care. As long as you treat me with the respect I deserve and treat me properly, I don’t care who or what they are.”

Fjord had never been so confused. Molly died before Fjord could ask for qualification.

If Jester was a little too friendly to Fjord beforehand, all that changed the moment they were forced aboard the Squall Eater.

Captain Avantika was so much more than Fjord had ever handled before in his life, too much of everything, and she took charge right away. Sure, Jester’s mother was the Ruby of the Sea and Molly was just a natural born flirt, but Avantika’s sly words and telling looks was still enough to take Fjord completely off guard.

She was just too much in every way. Too much power. Too much faith. Too much lust. Too much for Fjord.

That night in her quarters, sharing a bottle of expensive wine between them, Fjord never would have thought that the night would end with him beneath her, her hair in his face, her limbs tangled in his, the air being sucked from his lungs and into hers. It was what the moment needed, and it worked well for them in the long run, but he never would have expected it to go the way he had.

And he had never expected to enjoy it.

Jester acted differently towards him after that. Her kind words became clipped. Her genuine compliments became sarcastic. She avoided him unless it was absolutely necessary. She encouraged him to pursue a romantic and sexual relationship with Avantika, either for the cause or for himself, Fjord wasn’t sure, but at times she seemed jealous of what he was doing. He couldn’t understand, and it didn’t seem like any other member of the Nein was going to help him.

Mollymauk would know what to do. He always did.

But despite who she was and what she wanted and how she went about it, Avantika was the first woman Fjord had ever been to bed with, and while the reason he did it was less than savoury, the experience was something Fjord would not have given up for the world.

When he looked in the mirror, most days he saw that chubby little kid with the ugly tusks and unattractive green skin and hated it. Hated what he saw. Hated that he hated it. There was always going to be something in him that hated the pallor of his skin, hated the way air flowed over his tusks and made his voice sound stupid, hated the way women only loved him because they thought he was easy pickings.

Avantika was like that- like every toxic thought Fjord ever had personified. Jester wasn’t.

Jester was calm and sweet and genuine, and even when Fjord was doing things less than moral, she was always there by his side. She tattooed a smiley face with tusks and googly-eyes on every person they met, and despite himself, Fjord felt a little bit better about it. About it all. 

Beau pointed it out first, unbiased. “You know Jester is into you, right?”

Caleb was next, face masked by his hair and words muffled by his book. “I’m not so sure whether this is my right to say, but I think Jester has been looking at you rather closely lately, and I feel as though that is a possibility you should… entertain.”

Caduceus, with his deep voice and gentle laughter, “Keep an eye on Jester. She had been rather… how do I say, infatuated with you.”

But when Fjord brought it up with Jester herself, she shook her head and denied and refused as if Fjord had just accused her of pulling a rather unsavoury prank. “No, of course not, I have no idea what they’re talking about.”

There were many attractive people in Xhorhas, both men and women, and it was the first time since Molly got naked in the bath-house in Zadash that Fjord had found another man attractive, but it was true. Not all men, mind you, but a generous handful. The drow were delicate and a less opulent version of elves, the few tiefling’s were the opposite of everything Fjord knew and the half-orcs…

Well. They were everything Fjord wished he could have been.

Words cut deeper than they had in a long time, and for the first time since meeting Jester and the Mighty Nein and them seeing his tusks in the underground, he found himself overcompensating and pretending to be someone he wasn’t. Yasha caught on, which was unexpected, and Caduceus caught on, which _was_ expected, but Jester had been watching Fjord closer than normal ever since Uk’otoa had taken his powers for the first time and he had woken up choking on the sea, and he wasn’t sure how he felt about it.

For the first time in forever, he thought of brown hair and curvy hips and music and alleyways and stolen money and long blonde hair flipped over a shoulder and patronising laughter as bigger children kicked at him and dark skin and fair skin and red hair and blue hair and pointed ears and first kisses, dazzling grins and soft hands and all the women he thought he had loved and lost before it had even begun.

Jester was always a gentle hand and loving words and kind looks shared across the table, and despite everything they had gone through together, everything Fjord had done to no longer deserve her trust, she still looked at him like he was the only person in her world, and while Fjord didn’t understand it, he defiantly appreciated it.

Avankia was way too much all at once and every other woman he’d ever liked was not enough all too quickly and at first Jester was all of those things in a whirlwind of a holy fuck too much.

But now, maybe, after everything that had happened, he could finally move on and think of himself as more than that ugly little kid who was too disliked to ever fall in love and who deserved everything he got.

And maybe, Jester, who was now just enough when he needed it, could be his answer for that.


End file.
